Lung Deep Country

From the husk-haunted American Southern Plains to a ‘sunshine-lonely’ metro entrance in Turkey, Lung Deep Country sings a poetry of landscape and longing. The poet meditates on family and loss, the heaving of one’s spirit, the "great secret our grandmother taught us." With perfectly observed detail—"the rust-red watering edge" of Oklahoma’s Canadian River, "the elbows of men fighting for space in the crowded ferries" of Istanbul—Lydia Renfro evokes the wrenching power of lovers lost, childhood vanished, heritage claimed and held closely. "It is a family poem," she writes, "an earth poem…it bristles my heart and sings the wounds there." Lung Deep Country is a tour de force. These poems of yearning and place catch the heart, choke the throat; they call us to our own memories, entice us to "pick up the conversation we’ve left off," as the poet says, "—the one started as children in the deep night."

 

~ Rilla Askew, author of Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place

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Lung Deep Country is a finely structured debut that shows a poet in full command of her tools. Lydia Renfro writes with an instinct for lines that feel both natural and intentional, long breaths when the moment widens and sharply cut endings when the truth requires a jolt. Her imagery is vivid, precise, and rooted in the senses: red dirt and riverbanks, the scent of brown sugar after Pascha, the cool stone of an Istanbul hammam, the way “cicadas plagued our summer home then, singing us to sleep with their dusky timbal orchestras.” Every poem returns you to the real world of smell, sound, heat, and memory.

 

Family constellations burn bright here: brothers who leave and return changed, sisters woven through childhood nights, unborn kin held quietly in the margins. Her mixed Native heritage appears in glints, as in “I see shadows haunting this place, spirits walking west to ghost lands,” a reminder that place remembers us back.

 

What Renfro buries, she also resurrects. These poems transform what’s carried, echoing her vow: “If they put me in the ground, I will send out what I know.” Her craft is deliberate and sure-handed, lines that breathe, silences that hold, images you can practically smell and touch. Lung Deep Country marks the arrival of a striking new voice.

 

~ Karen Elizabeth Sharpe, author of Prayer Can Be Anything and This Late Afternoon

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Lydia Renfro’s Lung Deep Country is a love letter to “the textures of living, gradients of light, and curving moods” of a prairie childhood. Orbiting family and place, these poems express the plainsong of the everyday with a poet’s attention and sensibility, and consider how these forces seep into a feminine coming of age. Here, sisters “gather handfuls of vacant bodies” during cicada season, “and crush the molted casings with [their] fingers,/ wondering why the creature left herself behind;” a nuthatch “runs head first down Hemlock trees;” the “honeysuckle, snapdragon, and snakeroot” vine and compound into ancestral identity. Renfro bravely meets past, possible, and ongoing selves again and again; a tender turning and returning ever-present in these poems. ​​

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~ Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, author of  Songs for the Land-Bound

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These place-based poems thrum with the beauty of reclaimed freedom. With home always just out of reach, the speaker makes her own girlish belonging here in gathering unashamed hands, Red Hots-studded applesauce, cedar waxwing song, solitude, molted cicada shells, travels abroad, inheritance. Reminiscent of C. D. Wright, Lung Deep Country’s dazzling poems promise to “bristle [the] heart” and then "sing the wounds there.” This is a collection to savor.

 

~ Katherine Indermaur, author of I/I

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